This memorial depicting the names and pictures of Alabama's "fallen heroes," rests in the old Alabama Supreme Court Chamber in Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo courtesy of Robert Horton)

Early on a Tuesday morning in 2001, a commercial jetliner – followed quickly by another –pierced the clear New York sky and slammed into the World Trade Center. Less than an hour later, another hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon.

The term 9/11 entered the lexicon, and America found itself at war.

Four Alabamians were among the 189 who died in that attack on the Pentagon. They would be the first casualties in a conflict that would become the nation’s longest war. So far, 138 Alabamians have died in service to their country in that war. That is the 29th highest state per capita.

Aside from the human toll, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have carried financial costs. By one measure, the share of war spending since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom borne by the state’s residents and businesses exceeds $11.7 billion.

In the days leading up to Veterans Day, al.com and its affiliated newspapers will explore the various costs of the war effort, including personal stories of veterans and their families, the costs of benefits for veterans and rising suicide rates among people who served in combat.

Names and faces

The names and photos of the fallen are enshrined in a memorial that sits in the old Alabama Supreme Court Chamber in Montgomery.

“Unfortunately, we update that memorial every year,” said Robert Horton, whose database of the state’s fallen service members formed the basis of the memorial.

Horton had been named public information officer for the Alabama National Guard on Sept. 1, 2001. “Ten days later was 9/11,” he said.

Horton took it upon himself to create the database, which includes not only the names from the Pentagon’s official list of casualties from Alabama but also those with strong ties to the state, such as men who grew up in the Heart of Dixie but moved and enlisted in another state.

Horton continued adding to the list after he retired from the Guard in 2007 and took a position with the state Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I just felt that there needed to be a record of our fallen. I knew that the war would be long in duration,” he said. “I don’t think anyone, 11 years later, could know we’d still be fighting it.”

The cost of those wars has been steep – north of $1 trillion. And that does not even include the $636 billion that the federal government has spent on homeland security since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Noble Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz pegged the total liability at three times that much in his book, “Three Trillion War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.” He and co-author Linda Bilmes measured not only war spending but also related costs, such as benefits the country will provide disabled veterans for the rest of their lives.

“This is a lot of money, and I bet folks aren’t aware of this,” said Jo Comerford, executive director of the Massachusetts-based National Priorities Project.

$1.38 trillion and counting

Comerford’s organization maintains a website, costofwar.com, which provides a running total of spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It stands at $1.38 trillion and counting.

The $11.7 billion war spending portion ascribed to Alabama – a figure derived from the state’s share of taxes paid by businesses and people to the federal treasury -- climbs at a rate of about $100 every three seconds.

The website also offers estimates of the cost broken down to the county and city levels, in certain instances, as well as for all seven congressional districts. For those figures, Comerford said, the organization used a formula taking median household income into account.

So Mobile’s share is $423 billion and Birmingham’s is $442 billion. Residents and businesses in little Heflin have chipped in almost $6.3 million.

What could that money have gone to instead? The website offers a host of potential tradeoffs. All war spending since 2001, for instance, could have converted 594.5 million houses to solar energy for a year or paid the rent on a one-bedroom apartment for one year for 133.4 million people.

It could have paid for 195,543 elementary school teachers for a year in Alabama. Mobile’s share would have paid a year’s worth of groceries for every man, woman and child in the city. Birmingham’s share of just the enacted spending for the Afghanistan war for fiscal year 2012 equals the cost of 713 police officers.

The share attributed to residents and businesses in the 5th congressional district in north Alabama for the war in fiscal 2012 could have provided health care to 81,171 low-income children.

The point of the tradeoffs is not to advocate any of the alternatives, Comerford said, but to show the scale of the war’s cost.

For much of the war, Comerford said, the price has been obscured by a practice in the Bush administration of paying the costs outside of the normal budget process. Congress would pass supplemental spending bills – intended, she said, for unforeseen emergencies like Hurricane Katrina.

President Barack Obama shifted war costs to the regular budget. Even so, Comerford said, the costs have not sparked adequate debate.

“In a time when all eyes are on the federal budget and every dollar is under scrutiny, this is a sign of our financial obligation that doesn’t get discussed often,” she said. “I don’t think it’s that much in the public consciousness. … We really haven’t grappled with these numbers.”

Of course, costs are relative. The money that the United States has committed to the wars is high, but not historically high compared to past wars when measured against the size of the economy.

According to a 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress, war spending in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the peak year – 2008 – consumed about 1.2 percent of the nation’s resources. Total defense spending during that time was 4.3 percent.

Those figures for World War II in 1945, by comparison, were 35.8 percent and 37.5 percent, respectively. Even during the peak of the Vietnam War in 1968, according to the report, the nation was spending almost twice as much as the current wars as a percentage of gross domestic product. Total defense spending that year was 9.5 percent of GDP.

Casualties low

Marsha Ratchford's uniform and a copy of a photograph of her children are two of the items kept by her sister in Mobile, Alabama, Ratchford was one of four Alabamians who died in the Pentagon attacks. (Press-Register file photo)

According to the federal government, 6,628 U.S. military service personnel have died during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

That number pales compared with the death totals of American’s other major wars. World War II, for instance, claimed 405,399 American lives. In the 1950s, 36,574 service members died in the Korean War, and another 58,220 died in Vietnam.

The nature of those wars accounts for much of the disparity, but so do advances in doctors’ ability to save the lives of severely wounded soldiers. According to the Congressional Research Service, wounded service members were 1.5 to 6 times as likely to die in 20th century wars.

A look at the faces behind the statistics, though, shows the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have touched all corners of Alabama. The median age of Alabama’s fallen is 25; the most common age of death was 22.

Five men were 19, the youngest of the casualties. The oldest, Herbert Claunch, was 58 when he collapsed on the floor of his quarters at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was assigned with the Alabama National Guard 217th Military Police Co. in Prattville.

The service members’ ranks ranged from the lowest enlisted men to Col. Stephen Scott, who was exercising in the protected “Green Zone” in Baghdad when mortar fire struck the building in April 2008. Scott, who grew up and lived in New Market, Alabama, had been helping to oversee the transition of security forces to the Iraqi government.

Of the 138, four died in the Pentagon, 103 died in combat and 31 deaths have been classified as non-hostile. They ranged from maintenance accidents to a refueling tanker crash in Pakistan. Most of the deaths occurred in Iraq or Afghanistan, but Alabama service members also lost their lives in Pakistan, Israel, Qatar, Cuba, Kuwait and the Philippines.

Birmingham has lost the most people, eight, followed by Mobile (seven) and Montgomery (six). Some cities, though, have seen a disproportionate impact base on their size. For instance, Daleville, with 5,295 residents, has lost three service members – the same as Huntsville.

“When you see the names of Alabamians who have died in war, you understand the price Americans paid for our freedom,” said Horton, the VA official who started the database. “And you think of the families.”